Holly Lewis - The Politics of Everybody_ Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection-Zed Books (2016) - Rogelio Acosta Trejo

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The Politics 
of Everybody
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About the author
Holly Lewis is assistant professor of philosophy at Texas State 
University, where she teaches continental philosophy, economic 
and political philosophy, and aesthetics.
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The Politics 
of Everybody
Feminism, Queer Theory, and 
Marxism at the Intersection
Holly Lewis
Zed Books
LONDON
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The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism 
at the Intersection was first published in 2016 by Zed Books Ltd, 
The Foundry, 17 Oval Way, London SE11 5RR, UK.
www.zedbooks.co.uk
Copyright © Holly Lewis 2016
The right of Holly Lewis to be identified as the author of this 
work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, 
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro by seagulls.net
Index: John Barker
Cover designed by Dougal Burgess
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, 
stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, 
electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior 
permission of Zed Books Ltd. 
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 
ISBN 978-1-78360-288-9 hb
ISBN 978-1-78360-287-2 pb
ISBN 978-1-78360-289-6 pdf
ISBN 978-1-78360-290-2 epub
ISBN 978-1-78360-291-9 mobi
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http://www.zedbooks.co.uk
Contents
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1
I. The politics of everybody 1
II. Communitarian ideals and culture wars 8
III. How is every body sorted? 12
1. Terms of the debate 17
I. Debates in Western gender politics 18
 Epistemology and identity politics 18
 Queer (anti-)identity 25
 Sex and social gender: dichotomy or dialectic? 30
	 	 A	final	word	on	queer	language 33
II. What is capitalism? 35
 The origins of capitalism 36
 The basics of capitalist exchange 40
 The extraction of surplus value 42
III.		 Philosophy	and	the	Marxian	roots	of	queer	political	 
thought 46
 Marx and philosophy 47
 Epistemology revisited 51
 Changing words or changing worlds? 55
 The separation of politics and economics 60
 From Western Marxism to poststructuralism 64
IV. Conclusion 88
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2. Marxism and gender 93
I. Don’t be vulgar … 93
II.		 From	the	woman	question	to	the	gender	question 102
III. Marxism at the center and the periphery 105
IV. Marx on women 110
V. Marx on gender and labor 113
VI. The major works: Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks 
and Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private 
Property, and the State 121
VII. Early Marxist and socialist feminism 125
 Who	is	the	woman	in	the	woman	question? 125
 Sex and the utopian socialists 132
 Sex and the Second International 135
 Sex and the Russian Revolution 139
VIII. Theories of social reproduction 143
IX. Race and social reproduction 155
X. Marxism and the second wave 166
3. From queer nationalism to queer Marxism 187
I. The vector model of oppression 187
II. Racecraft and ideological repetition 196
III. Sexcraft and ideological repetition 198
IV. Class is not a moral category 201
V.		 The	rise	of	queer	politics	 203
VI.		 Marxist	critiques	of	queer	theory 212
VII. Beyond homonormativity and homonationalism 222
VIII.	The	spinning	compass	of	American	queer	politics 230
 The problem of marriage and family 230
	 	 The	problem	of	queer	imperialism 238
IX.		 The	world	is	a	very	queer	place	 245
X.		 The	queer	Marxist	critique	of	postcolonialism 247
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4. Conclusions 257
I. Solidarity means taking sides 257
 Solidarity and ideologies of sex/gender 264
II.		 Ten	axioms	towards	a	queer	Marxist	future 270
Notes 283
Bibliography 311
Index 327
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In loving memory of Daniel Lewis
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xi
Acknowledgements
My thoughts on gender and sexuality began to take real shape 
when I co-taught the course ‘Trans: Dangerous Border Violations’ 
in 2004 with Sandy Stone, whose brilliance, warmth, and open-
ness have been an inspiration to me since. I must thank Wolfgang 
Schirmacher for encouraging me despite the fact (or maybe because 
of the fact) that I was a rather unconventional graduate student. 
My doctoral work has little to do with this book; however, Alain 
Badiou’s comments have stayed with me: his insistence that 
amorous subjects and political subjects pursue separate truths 
helped me distinguish the productive tensions from the irrelevant 
bluster in queer politics.
This book would not have been possible without the support 
of the Department of Philosophy at Texas State University. I 
am incredibly fortunate to have worked under two particularly 
talented chairs, Vincent Luizzi and Craig Hanks. I thank Beverly 
Pairett, Camrie Pipper, and my graduate teaching assistants in the 
Applied Philosophy and Ethics Program for their helpfulness over 
the years.
Kika Sroka-Miller approached me about writing a book in late 
2012. I am grateful that she and Zed Books continued to take me 
seriously after I decided to write something called The Politics of 
Everybody. I must also give thanks to my mystery reviewers for their 
insightful remarks, and to my patient copyeditor, Judith Forshaw. 
'
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The Politics of Everybody
xii
Many of the book’s key arguments were presented over the years 
at the Historical Materialism Conference in London. Though they 
might not know it, comments made by Alan Sears, Abigail Bakan, 
Kevin Floyd, Paul Reynolds, and Nat Raha were instructive. And 
thanks to Ahmed Shawki for helping me get there. 
This book is a product of many long nights of debate. I have 
taken so much over the years from discussions with Snehal Shin-
gavi, Karen Dominguez Burke, Katie Feyh, Tithi Bhattacharya, 
Sarah Wolf, Dana Cloud, Jason Netek, Jamie Saunders, Sharon 
Smith, Nikeeta Slade, and Sherry Wolf. 
People don’t get to spend years with their face shoved in a 
computer without help from family and friends. I thank my 
mother, Penelope Lewis, for doing all those invisible things – for 
so many years – that mothers do, and my friends Damian Pring, 
Hache Buller, Caitlin Lowell, Erik Allesee, and Angela Smith. Also, 
I want to thank Cindy Beringer for just being, you know, Cindy. It 
would take an entire separate book to properly thank my beloved 
partner in crime, Bug Davidson. 
My father, Daniel Lewis, passed away soon after I finished the 
outline for the book. In addition to being a devoted father, he was 
deeply committed to fighting racism and taught me to never cross 
a picket line. You really can’t ask for more than that. This book is 
dedicated to him. 
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1
Introduction
I. The politics of everybody
The word everybody is politically unsettling. It evokes harmony and 
erasure, connectedness and enchainment; everybody is everywhere 
but nowhere in particular; the fact of everybody is inconceivable 
yet certain; everybody is an ever-changing limit. Everybody is both 
the us and the them. These days, the idea of everybody is most 
often used to mystify social relations. Phrases such as ‘we’re all in 
this together’, ‘one big happy family’ and ‘be a team player’ reflect 
this. But the idea can also inspire us to demand ‘our’ inclusion in 
‘their’ world; it reminds us that ‘we’ are the ones who make ‘their’ 
world possible – which of course means the world was always ‘all of 
ours’ all along. (Of course, most of ‘them’ find this sort of thinking 
threatening.) This book doesn’t claim that there is a political philos-
ophy or practice called ‘the politics of everybody’, letalone that I 
am some sort of visionary here to impart the one true version of that 
politics. The title simply makes the point that the word ‘everybody’ 
is politically provocative. It is particularly provocative because we 
live in an age where the way we produce things – the mode of 
production called capitalism – requires ideological individualism. 
One term for trying to think beyond individualism has been, 
historically speaking, the idea of the totality. But totality has many 
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The Politics of Everybody
2
connotations that the word ‘everybody’ does not. Totality connotes 
stasis, structure, permanence, and closure. Totality is difficult to 
reconcile with movement and historical change. The word ‘every-
body’, on the other hand, is a little less ambitious, a little more 
material, and it makes a little more room for the interpersonal.
After the Copernican revolution, humans have had to accept 
that we’re not the center of the universe; we’re just a contingent 
collective floating in space, stuck together on the same planet. 
Economic expansion reduces the experience of distance; technol-
ogies developed to facilitate the circulation of commodities bring 
us closer to one another – whether we like it or not. In the age of 
global warming and digital satellites, it is no longer reasonable to 
imagine the world as a collection of territories with distinct bound-
aries. However, neither is it reasonable to envision the world as an 
unbounded multitude1 that has shed all borders, states, and limits: 
along with the unprecedented movement of bodies and goods, 
migrant labor, families fleeing war, prisoners, and former felons, 
perhaps more than ever, are at once adrift and stuck in place. 
The cataclysmic ecological threat posed by the capitalist mode 
of production (the mindless pace it requires, the inevitable waste 
created in its boom and bust cycles) threatens everyone and 
requires real solutions. But genuine solutions require the inter-
ruption of profit extraction and must be applied at the point of 
production. For the few who benefit from this system of produc-
tion – the industrial capitalists, and the financial capitalists who 
help them spin their profits into wild fictions – protecting the 
system from criticism is itself a matter of survival. The capitalist 
mode of production cannot be faulted. When climate change is not 
denied outright, at least the blame can be shifted. Environmental 
devastation becomes everybody’s fault, and the critical eye is turned 
toward the consumer. Suddenly, the problem is no longer political; 
now it is ethical. The word ‘everybody’ here operates as a diver-
sionary tactic so that capitalist processes don’t come under scrutiny. 
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3
Introduction
Personal awareness campaigns – the solution to all liberal plural-
ism’s problems – displace calls for system change. Ethics is the final 
frontier of social change within the liberal pluralist world because 
the market is, by nature, blameless. The market is imagined to 
operate principally at the microeconomic level. It is a manifestation 
of and a servant to our desires. Thus, the desiring consumer subject 
is the root of the world’s problems. For this reason, mindfulness is 
the key to global harmony – each of us must be made aware of how 
thoughtless we are toward one another and Mother Earth, but most 
of all how we harm ourselves. Yet liberal2 environmental awareness 
campaigns all hinge on one hidden truth: that social relations are 
conditioned by the imperatives of capitalist production. Therefore, 
such awareness campaigns are actually often their opposite: mysti-
fications. This particular mystification, in part, comes via another 
cornerstone of liberal ideology: the notion that debate and discus-
sion are inherently valuable. Now, this mystification doesn’t occur 
because discussion is actually encouraged. It occurs because those 
who own the means of production under capitalism also own the 
means of communication as well as the land where ordinary people 
would gather to discuss and debate. What comes over the airwaves 
and fills online news feeds masquerades as debate, but in reality it 
is nothing more than a wall of noise. That wall of noise serves a 
number of functions. One of those functions is to assure the public 
that the interests of the market are also their interests, that the 
market functions perfectly so long as the people it impoverishes 
don’t trouble it, and that capitalist production is way too complex 
for the average mind to comprehend. In fact, even great minds 
shouldn’t be able to understand it; the only reason to understand 
it is in order to know how to wring short-term profits from it. So, 
under capitalism, the term everybody is a political euphemism used 
by capitalists (and those who believe them) to deflect responsibility 
for systemic processes onto consumers who cannot control them. 
But beneath the gloss, there is a deep hatred of ‘the everybody’ (the 
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The Politics of Everybody
4
faceless masses, other people’s kids, other people’s nations, other 
people’s religions) combined with a sense of collective ownership of 
other people’s achievements (multiculturalism). Everybody exists 
to sacrifice for the few. 
Still, there are other illiberal ways of imagining the problem of 
everybody. For fascist politics, the word ‘everybody’ means every-
body in their place. Fascist politics demands a well-ordered world 
where every group is a whole, where every body acts as one body. 
So long as they keep within their boundaries, fascists may recognize 
other similarly purified bodies, other homogeneous nations – good 
fences make good neighbors. Of course, there is always a danger that 
one purified nation-body may come to see other purified nation-
bodies (or all of them) as pollutants and barriers to the unified body 
of the world. Either way, fascism involves the cleansing of bodies, if 
not their eradication. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that fascist 
politics acknowledges antagonism. Fascist politics can destroy 
bodies and claim to be doing so for the good of everybody. All it 
need do is pronounce that some bodies are nobodies; then it can 
eradicate the nobodies until everybody is a somebody. In the fascist 
schema, the nobodies are easy to spot: they’re the ones without an 
identity, the ones without a home, the ones without a specific place 
to be – the internationalists, the immigrants, the ‘street’ people, the 
ones whose land has been stolen, the ones stolen from their lands, 
the ones who never had a land to begin with, the ones who live in 
the in-between. The fulcrum of the fascist approach to the political 
question of everybody is the ecstasy of communal harmony made 
possible only by expelling foreign bodies. The mid-twentieth- 
century American consensus, still popular, is that the structural core 
of fascism is the desire to conform, the impulse to give up one’s will 
to orthodoxy.3 Ascribing causal agency to orthodoxy and unifor-
mity is not without benefit to liberal ideology. If uniformity is the 
root cause of violent extermination, the solution to such violence is 
clearly the heterogeneity of the global marketplace, where creative 
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5
Introduction
individuals can construct themselves through a mosaic of interna-
tional products and novelties. 
While, to the fascist imaginary, international markets erase 
the purity of the collective, for colonial and decolonial subjects4 
the international market is a different sort of erasure. This mix of 
global cultural material is not a pollution of the fatherland, but a 
final hollowing out of what has not already been erased by imperial 
conquest. The chaos of the market blurs the lines between cultural 
imperialism and appreciative sharing, between appropriation and 
symbolic support.Because the material legacy of colonialism and 
imperialism is conceptually obscured within the academy, the 
liberal pluralist solution to colonial erasure is a matter of respecting 
the hurt feelings of the other, whose hurt feelings are an indict-
ment of the liberal pluralist’s own political failure to be inclusive. 
In order to defend against liberal multiculturalism, the decolonial 
activist is deeply suspect of any use of the word ‘everybody’. Her 
language, culture, and identity have been usurped by this ‘every-
body’. Western depictions either hollow her out into a nobody, or 
treat her as a hallowed object, which is, in the end, just another way 
of being treated as a nobody. But there is a maddening contradic-
tion at work here: capitalist accumulation was the material engine 
of colonization, and cultural reclamation is not a sufficient condi-
tion for ending it; because capitalist expansion is not threatened by 
anticolonial struggle alone (Fanon 1963),5 the anticolonial activist 
must work alongside others who are also struggling against capi-
talism. And those ‘struggling others’ could be anybody – and what 
is an anybody if not an emissary from the everybody? 
Socialists have a different illiberal relationship to the word 
‘everybody’. For Marxists, the liberation of all groups depends on 
the self-emancipation of one group – one international group – 
the proletariat. Unfortunately, under neoliberalism Marx’s ideas 
have fallen prey to the wall of noise. Marxism and the proletariat 
operate as caricatures; they are treated more as punctuation marks 
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6
than as words that could have meaning. As labor struggle has been 
pushed out of the lean6 workplace and replaced by an all-for-one-
and-one-for-all mentality that has absolutely nothing to do with 
solidarity, Marxist theory has largely been expelled from the lean 
university. If actual Marxian economic analysis is absent, prole-
tarian revolution is re-imagined as a nostalgic, reactionary identity 
politics that positions beefy, mallet-wielding male workers as 
both the most oppressed and the most important creatures on 
the planet. This imagery obscures the fact that today’s proletarian 
is more likely to be a young woman on an assembly line than a 
‘Mallet Man’ of the nineteenth century. In the university, Marx is 
imagined as a philosopher who perhaps made some good points 
about modern alienation, but who was so focused on the factory 
that he failed to see the anti-hegemonic roles that could be played 
by women, subalterns, and middle-class intellectuals. But working 
class does not entail ‘maleness’. Nor is ‘proletarian’ a fixed social 
identity loaded with predicates; it is the position of value genera-
tion within the capitalist circulation of commodities; and, as the 
source of value in capitalism, it is also the lynchpin for overcoming 
it. Capitalism is not a code word for a cabal of evildoers tenting 
their fingers in sadistic pleasure at the thought of ruining the 
minds and bodies of working people: it is an impersonal system of 
material social relations. 
Because capitalism is a system of social relations, not a person, 
static group, or moral agreement, it does not respond to moral 
arguments or moral outrage. The world’s Scrooges will not bring 
a pheasant to the world’s Tiny Tims. The Grinch’s heart will not 
grow three sizes larger and he will not return the Christmas gifts to 
Whoville. Capitalism responds only to what interrupts the gener-
ation of profit; and since it is the source of value, labor is both 
capitalism’s greatest asset and its potential downfall. Labor is not 
the focal point of Marxist politics because Marx felt more outrage 
over the fate of working folks than other groups of disenfranchised 
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7
Introduction
people, nor is Marxism a moral argument that proletarians are an 
honorable and valiant people, morally superior to the middle and 
upper classes. The proletarian is the pivotal political subject because 
productive labor is the strategic point from which capitalism 
is dismantled. This is not the same as saying that only employed 
people have agency or political value. Workers, the unemployed, 
their dependents, and allies routinely find creative ways to collude 
against capital.7 Anti-capitalist struggle is not a matter of making 
people aware of how bad life is under capitalism. It is not a matter 
of guilting the rich into making concessions. The only awareness 
campaign capable of making a difference in capitalist accumulation 
is the one that explains to working people what the liberal awareness 
campaign intentionally ignores: how the capitalist mode of produc-
tion actually works. But even awareness about the capitalist mode 
of production will not change it. You actually have to change it to 
change it. And changing it is a collective action that requires more 
than awareness. But it is an action that anybody can join. 
The Marxist understanding of ‘everybody’ is the reverse of fascist 
ideology. Marxism requires a group from everywhere – which is 
also to say from nowhere in particular – to end a foundational 
historical injustice. In Marxist terms, everybody is a somebody and 
everybody belongs everywhere. Marxists do not seek to eradicate 
a people or even a group of individual persons named capital-
ists. Marxism seeks to eradicate a social relationship: the relation 
between the forces who create and sustain the world, and those 
who expropriate that creativity – be it for personal gain, familial 
gain, the gain of their particular social stratum, or the gain of a 
culture or nation. State apparatuses are necessary to maintain this 
social relationship. But the uneven development of states and the 
inconsistency of legal practices are not barriers to capital; rather, 
such disparities afford capital a wider playing field. The history of 
liberal thought likes to use the language of universalism, but the 
truth is that it thrives on leveraging difference. 
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The Politics of Everybody
8
Like the fear-inducing term ‘totality’, universal politics is 
also generally characterized as more threatening than emanci-
patory. Instead of evoking the possibility of human connection, 
universal inclusivity evokes the destruction of the self, the destruc-
tion of history, and the spread of cultural dominance: in short, 
universalism and totalitarianism are twins in the modern political 
imaginary. Universalism seems to mean its opposite: that sovereign 
cultures are absorbed into a dominant culture that arrogates itself 
as the entire universe. In response to the violence of this brand of 
universal politics, a paranoid individualism has emerged in which 
family, community, and culture – plurals of the self – are imagined 
to form the only bulwark against absorption into the everybody 
that is a cover for nothingness. Such paranoid individualism is 
a response to real historical turns under the conditions of capi-
talist development: colonization, consumerist multiculturalism, 
imperialism, factory discipline, failed revolutions, and the never-
ending rhetoric informing us that there are too many people for 
the world to handle. But a contradiction is at work here as well. 
Although the current social and economic system seems to destroy 
the community and the individual through war and mass produc-
tion, it ironically produces communities (i.e. nations, ‘coalitions 
of the willing’, ‘our democracies’, cultural markets, and so on) and 
sovereign individuals (by insisting that we are unique, that we must 
stand out from the crowd, that one has a duty to express oneself 
through commodities) through mass production. 
II. Communitarian ideals and culture wars
Although Western – particularly American – progressives and 
conservatives are locked in a culture war, both sides are structured 
by a buriedanxiety about the destruction of the self and its plurals. 
On the progressive side, this concern is expressed through affir-
mations of diversity. Let’s call this form of liberalism progressive 
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9
Introduction
communitarianism. Liberalism’s other face is conservative and 
marked by a negative freedom: individuality is expressed by the 
freedom to exclude, to preserve oneself and one’s cultural history. 
The highest law is that individuals should not be forced to interact 
with those they disdain. We can call this conservative communitar-
ianism. Although progressive communitarianism rejects the idea 
of cultural domination, it is absolutely distinct from anticolonial 
movements of national liberation. Progressive communitarianism 
holds a commitment to a vague pacifism predicated on a respect for 
human difference and cultural diversity; it sees cultural dominance 
at the root of alienation, often ignoring the material dominance 
that situates the cultural. Conservative communitarianism is a 
commitment to one’s own distinct community and no other; it 
is a campaign against intergroup transformation; the progressive 
communitarian respect for cultural diversity is viewed as a threat to 
the communitarian conservative’s own cultural specialness. These 
are the basic commitments in what are called the culture wars. The 
two positions clash on issues of national sovereignty but do so on 
the same common ground. When a nation is colonized by another, 
progressive communitarians attribute attempts to erase difference as 
the core motivation of the aggressor nation; conservative commu-
nitarians stand on the argument: ‘We erase because they threaten 
to erase us.’ Where progressive communitarians see a paranoid 
fear of those who are different, conservative communitarians see a 
genuine threat. Still, both arguments are cultural explanations for 
global unrest. As soon as colonized people resist under terms that 
are anything other than utter pacifism, the progressive communi-
tarians line up behind conservatives because now the fears of the 
right-wing communitarians are justified – now the difference really 
is a threat. In other words, liberal pluralism is committed to differ-
ence so long as difference isn’t antagonistic, so long as it has no 
substance, so long as it stays in the realm of pure theory – so long 
as it isn’t really different. 
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Neoliberal political thought, whether progressive or conserva-
tive, acknowledges two great classes in the world: not capitalists 
and proletarians, but producers and consumers. In the United 
States, Americans of all political persuasions bemoan our mind-
less consumption; the complaint is even heard among those who 
struggle to make ends meet. Social change is generally imagined 
in terms of boycotting big box stores, buying from companies 
that support your cultural values, and voting with your dollar. 
Work is not a location for politics; it is the place where your sins 
begin, where you get the money to become a good consumer. But 
consumerism and commodification are not causes of exploitation 
but consequences. There is no categorical split between producers 
and consumers. All producers must consume. The irony of capi-
talism is that the more energy you give to it, the less you receive 
from it. The irony of the anti-consumerist response to capi-
talism is that consumption-based solutions position the poorest 
workers and the unemployed as the staunchest proponents of the 
system; the unwashed masses are treated like accomplices of the 
megacorporations because they can’t afford to buy local, organic, 
sustainable goods. But what never seems to be local are the steel 
mills, the tin mines, the factories where gadgets are assembled, 
and the silica-processing plants. The steel beams holding up the 
natural foods store are not organic. Proponents of consumer poli-
tics forget Adam Smith’s insight that the commodity is not just 
one ‘thing’, traceable to one person or set of people. It is concret-
ized through invisible processes. 
Ethical consumption can’t touch the core of these invisible 
processes. Each of us has a network of invisible caretakers scat-
tered across the globe, fulfilling tasks once performed within the 
community. People we don’t know stitch together our underwear, 
mine the metals used to make the machines that make our bicycles 
and pots, harvest our grain, grind the sand to make our drinking 
glasses. Sometimes our invisible caretakers live in town: lifting 
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11
Introduction
boxes from pallets, grading our term papers, preparing food in the 
backs of restaurants, cleaning our shit off public toilets. But this 
is not merely a parasitic relation of consumers to workers. One of 
the fundamental conditions of the capitalist epoch is that workers, 
who have nothing but their labor to sell, are also forced to live 
off other people working in the system. It’s not just the wealthy 
consuming manufactured goods; we’re all subsumed into the capi-
talist economy. The only way to mount a challenge against a global 
system – a global militarized system – is through a politics that 
addresses global subjects and asserts that there is commensurability 
between them. In other words, the only way to confront the system 
is to develop solidarity between those who must labor – including 
those who are unable to labor – in this enormous network of mines, 
mills, factories, schools, stores, and transport centers: solidarity 
between the visible and the invisible, the waged and the unwaged. 
Solidarity among such a large subset of people is bound to be a 
fluid, internally shifting collective political subject. Anti-capitalist 
solidarity implies interrupting the expropriation of surplus value 
with the end goal of system change. That requires a principle of 
minimal connection between political actors. Minimal connection 
simply means that grounds for solidarity are possible. I would like 
to advance the case that pointless suffering might be such a point of 
commonality. We might suffer for lovers, for art, for political or 
religious truths, or, sadly, because we think we deserve to suffer. 
But pointless suffering is tragic by definition.8 The statement that 
experiencing pointless suffering is universally undesired might 
seem banal, but the assertion that there is even one commonality 
among people is surprisingly contentious. This contention is based 
on the position that if you dip your toe into the waters of univer-
sality, soon you’ll be swimming in European male dominance. 
But all gestures toward common human feeling are not alike. So 
let’s call the universalism of market forces and the streamlining of 
human life into a conduit for the enrichment of the few by the 
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12
name universalism from above, and let’s call the solidarity necessary 
to oppose universalism from above by the name universalism from 
below. Or, alternatively, we could think of it as a political commit-
ment to everybody – not a toothless humanism, but a militant 
commitment to inclusion that doesn’t deny antagonisms. 
III. How is every body sorted? 
The ideology of immutable sexual difference is an enormous barrier 
in trying to imagine ‘everybody’. The world is generally understood 
to be split into two ontological categories – male and female – and 
nobody becomes a ‘nobody’ faster than those who don’t fit into one 
of these two groups. In addition to the fact that there are antag-
onisms between the two categories, there are also antagonisms 
between those within the categories and those outside them. But 
sex categorization changes according to time and place; it is condi-
tioned by a given society’s material organization and the divisions 
resulting from that particular organization.In the patriarchal mode from settled civilization to feudal 
relations, sex was understood as a natural relationship based on 
hierarchy and complementarity. Woman completed man and 
served to perpetuate his and his son’s existence. This patriarchal 
model, alien to human existence for hundreds of thousands of 
years before sedentarization, began to fissure as industrialization 
changed the physical and historical landscape. As women and 
children moved into factory work, a renewed nervousness about 
the ontological power of sex difference developed. Delicacy was 
enforced upon the women of the upper classes. Women of the 
lower classes were expected to be maternal, to be sexually available 
to rich men, and to be masculine enough to be able to shovel 
dung – sometimes all at once. Class divisions and racial divisions 
troubled the idea that the maleness and femaleness of the body 
unfolded from a spiritual essence.
Politics of Everybody.indd 12 02/12/2015 17:44
13
Introduction
In the twentieth century – especially in urban, industrial 
regions – gender began to appear as something contingent. There 
was the truth of sex and then there was gender, those sets of social 
norms layered on top of the real body. Body was nature; gender 
was culture. And culture implied contingency. The women’s move-
ment was galvanized: women’s bodies and lives should not have to 
conform to gender expectations. But many people were left out 
of this political formula: in particular, those whose bodies didn’t 
conform to gender expectations, who faced brutal exclusion for 
their nonconformity. The excluded weren’t necessarily genderless 
– in fact, often quite the opposite – rather, their genders and their 
bodies didn’t match: their natural gender didn’t seem to fit with 
the way their culture thought their bodies should look or act. An 
antagonism developed. There were some who felt that their bodies 
were true, and that gender was a political imposition shaping 
people within their ‘biological’ sex category. Others maintained 
that a given social gender felt right, except it didn’t match cultural 
expectations of how their bodies were sexed. Then, towards the end 
of the century, it was discovered that many individuals – intersex 
people – had been and were being surgically altered by doctors to fit 
into one of the two ‘true’ biological sexes; what’s more, in different 
cultures they would be put into different ‘true’ boxes where they 
would grow up with different expectations of their social gender. 
On top of all this, there were people who were amorous toward 
people of the same sex, while others were amorous toward people 
who didn’t fit into any expected sexual category. 
People are not merely carved up into nations and cultures 
within capitalist social relations, they also inhabit complex bodies 
that are collectively coded into different functions, functions that 
operate within the context of nation, culture, and class. Scientific 
research inspired by the critique of sexual dimorphism is increas-
ingly showing that sex exists on a continuum, with a substantial 
number of people at a distance from the two extremes. Liberal 
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The Politics of Everybody
14
pluralist politics has easily solved this problem by reconciling 
the various opinions about sex and gender into a permanent 
dialogue: there is money to be made by those who support queer 
rights, and there is money to be made by those who oppose them. 
Of course, illiberal conservative politics has a clear gender policy 
and this policy is that gender must be clear. Postcolonial work on 
sexual diversity has revealed that diverse sexuality was yet another 
casualty of colonial violence. But how does the Marxist paradigm 
reconcile its understanding of inclusivity together with gender 
and sexual alterity? What are the material conditions that shape 
the politics of sex and gender, and how do they relate to capi-
talism and anti-capitalism? These questions are what this book 
hopes to begin to resolve. 
It is not a question irrelevant to all but those affected by anti-
queer and anti-trans violence. There are forces of purification 
at work – those who see the world not as a profitable unity of 
producers and consumers, not as an antagonism between capital-
ists and workers, not even as an antagonism between colonizers 
and colonized. They see the world as a battle between ‘traditional 
people’ and ‘homosexuals’ – homosexual being a symbol for all 
sexual and gender diversity and all struggles against sexism. The 
‘homosexual’ is the nobody who needs to become nothing. These 
forces are quietly conducting their purifying project among the poor 
and working classes in Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. 
Solidarity with queer, trans, and intersex people is non-negotiable 
when it comes to the international solidarity of the working class. 
I write this in the hope of bringing four groups into dialogue: 
Marxist theorists who are trying to understand where gender fits 
into the schema of Marxist practice; feminist theorists who wish 
to incorporate Marxist analysis in their work; Marxist practitioners 
unfamiliar with the politics and origins of third-wave feminist, 
queer, and trans politics; and, finally, queer and trans feminist 
activists unfamiliar with Marxist political economy. There are 
Politics of Everybody.indd 14 02/12/2015 17:44
15
Introduction
readers who will belong to overlapping sets and, of course, those 
who find themselves outside these groups altogether. 
Because I hope to bring distinct groups into dialogue, the first 
chapter defines the terms necessary to ground the book’s argument 
and the debates that inform it. The second chapter contains a 
history of Marxist-feminism, its internal and external critiques, and 
an inquiry into the materialist roots of queer and trans oppression 
from a Marxist-feminist perspective. The third chapter discusses 
the relationship between ideology and queer theory, questions 
current popular approaches to queer anti-capitalism, and discusses 
the barriers to a queer Marxist internationalism. The final chapter 
includes recommendations for action. 
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CHAPTER 1
Terms of the debate 
This book has the difficult task of speaking to multiple audiences: 
third-wave feminists and queer theorists who have commitments 
to gender and sexual liberation but who have little familiarity 
with Marxian economics; Marxists who want to go beyond facile 
dismissals of ‘identity politics’ to better understand the relation-
ship between the objective realities of material existence and the 
experience of that material existence; and those working to clarify 
their political and philosophical orientation towards gender. Each 
readership comes with a distinct set of languages, political histories, 
and conceptual tools. 
Chapter 1 serves as an overview of the concepts fundamental to 
each political approach. This conceptual outline also foreshadows 
the overall argument of this book: that to live up to its own inclu-
sive values, Marxist politics must understand gender politics; and 
that any gender politics of merit will contain an anti-capitalist 
critique that goes beyond moral posturing. 
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18
I. Debates in Western gender politics
Epistemology and identity politics
Within Marxists and various third-wave feminist camps, the term 
‘identity politics’ is more slur than genuine political critique. For 
Marxists, the slur refers to politics that substitute systemic histor-
ical and economic analyses with inquiries into intrapersonal 
aggression. Marxist political activity does not require a proletarian 
identity politics because Marxist analysis involves impersonal, 
macro political investigations. However, the majority of current 
Marxist thought1takes anti-oppression seriously and is committed 
to tackling sexism, imperialism, colonialism, racism, homophobia, 
and transphobia. So Marxists do understand that identities exist 
and that being stuck with a particular label has political conse-
quences; there is no denial that capitalism sorts human material 
according to market criteria and that this creates immense suffering 
within certain groups. Identity politics is irreconcilable with 
Marxism only if the former is understood to entail a world where 
communication and solidarity are possible only among those who 
share specific experiences. Such a requirement would necessarily 
divide the working classes into insurmountable, static antagonisms. 
Since capitalism already divides workers – giving some carrots and 
others sticks – further divisions among the stick-beaten and the 
carrot-rewarded cannot resolve injustice: for Marxists, only ending 
capitalism will be equal to the task because the conditions of justice 
are historical and class specific.2 
Feminist, queer, and trans critiques of identity politics differ 
from the Marxist critique. Both the second and third waves of 
feminist thought criticize the concept of objectivity, and instead 
champion epistemologies based on situated knowledge. Within 
feminism, ‘identity politics’ is a political error that occurs when 
an individual or group overemphasizes the impact of or naturalizes 
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19
Terms of the debate
a given standpoint – for example, reducing a person to the assumed 
experience of the group with which they are identified, or auto-
matically treating any individual within a group as if they are 
representative of that group. As a poststructuralist enterprise, queer 
theory has a very different take. Queer theory asserts that iden-
tity, as a conceptual category, serves as a disciplinary apparatus that 
pigeonholes the fluidity of the self into a politically docile norma-
tivity. This places the queer subject in a privileged epistemological 
position: those who experience no gender dissonance vis-à-vis the 
system are ignorant of its force and its contours.3 Queer subjects are 
diverse, but share a collective understanding of gender discipline 
that forms a basis for political cohesion. For queer theory, the term 
‘identity politics’ is derogatory because it assumes that identities 
– clear-cut groupings with clear definitions – are desirable. When 
political thinkers dismiss queer theory as mere identity politics, 
this is fundamentally incorrect. Queer theory is an anti-identity 
identity politics. The Marxist critique of many (non-Marxist) femi-
nisms and queer theory is that if you want to analyze inequality as 
systemic, it is necessary to transcend the individual mind. If knowl-
edge is contained within a standpoint, rather than capable of being 
inflected by a standpoint, then systemic knowledge is not possible 
and, as a consequence, inequality cannot be fought systematically. 
Each of the frameworks above also takes a different object for its 
epistemology: the feminist meaning of ‘system’ is patriarchy, while 
queer theory understands ‘systemicity’ to be discursive structures 
willfully kept in place by those who benefit from the system. The 
object of Marxist epistemology, on the other hand, is the material 
organization of society (Henning 2014). As a consequence of these 
different understandings of what is meant by the term system, 
Marxists, queer activists, and feminists (particularly second-wave 
feminists whose feminism is not wedded to queer politics) tend to 
talk past one another in their critiques of identity politics. This is not 
to say that political practitioners of these viewpoints are completely 
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20
consistent in their epistemological commitments. For example, the 
Marxist legacy of independent journalism rests on the notion that 
there are no unbiased witnesses to history. The difference, however, 
between Marxian approaches to journalism (or, if we divorce the 
concept from institutions and professions, speaking from the event) 
and poststructuralist approaches is that, for Marxists, the posi-
tioned witness is considered able to surpass their own personal, 
phenomenological experience of events. The Marxist witness can 
deduce general information from their particular position.4 The 
Marxist witness, like the socially disciplined queer subject, is also 
given an epistemological advantage in that their position allows 
them to witness the appearance of cracks on the surface of capitalist 
ideology. But the queer political subject experiences the system as 
an overwhelming and inscrutable alienating spiritual force, while 
the Marxist subject’s political goals require her to translate her 
standpoint into an outlook that is objectively valuable. 
While Marxists do not entirely negate the value of situated 
knowledge, queer theorists are often ambivalent or unclear about 
objectivity. In poststructuralist queer thought, to theorize about the 
system is itself to ‘systematize’ knowledge of injustice, thereby elim-
inating the interpersonal; however, at the same time, queer theory 
is predicated on what it calls ‘dismantling discursive disciplinary 
apparatuses’ – that is, pointing out how systems of ideas shape 
people. It is hard to point out how systems of ideas shape people 
without first conceptualizing how the system works – so system-
atic thought makes you think systematically! The queer theoretical 
solution for dismantling the system is not a new identity politics 
or even an opposition to identity politics, but rather a conscious 
demand for ideological change in the abstract. Change is not imag-
ined as a struggle over material social relations; it is a struggle for 
discursive changes, for collective shifts in language. These changes 
come at the level of individual speech acts and symbolic ruptures. 
Political change is understood as the outcome of an aggregate 
Politics of Everybody.indd 20 02/12/2015 17:44
21
Terms of the debate
of individual acts. Yet, paradoxically, discursive politics leads to, 
indeed requires, significant policing of language. Because systemic 
violence is entirely ideological, choosing appropriate terminology 
becomes a political act. The reverse of this is that using the wrong 
terminology becomes an act of ideological violence. This creates 
a significant barrier to political agency because discursive politics 
demands that people be trained in the correct phraseology (in fact, 
self-trained in the correct phraseology, because collective training 
would subject others to the violence of normativized discourse). 
It is difficult to image an internationalist model of discursive poli-
tics. If ‘system’ means ‘ideology’, and if disrupting ideology is a 
linguistic act, then the terrain of political struggle would reside 
within distinct language groups and cultures, cultures that then 
have no real reason to communicate with one another beyond 
multicultural pleasantries. Cultural incommensurability becomes 
absolute. We find ourselves under the authority of ‘the dictatorship 
of the fragments’ (Best 1989: 361).
Nor is third-wave feminism immune from epistemological 
inconsistency. For example, third-wave feminists maintain that 
racism, sexism, and homophobia are systemic, not a mere matter 
of individual micro-aggressions; yet they assert rather than explain 
how the system produces gender injustice and how gender injustice 
comes to be a feature of the social system. When the term ‘system’ 
is conceived as an interpersonal network in which certain groups 
are socially empowered, the political solution to systemic injustice 
becomes the replacing of anti-feminist policymakers with feminist 
policymakers. Such an approach conceives of system change as a 
matter of getting the right individuals into the right positions, and 
social identity cannot help but determinewho is the right indi-
vidual. Even if this conception of politics concedes the limits of 
identity (Sarah Palin and Imelda Marcos come to mind), the elec-
tion of the right individuals to the right political posts is highly 
valued in this model. 
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22
In other words, even though feminists and queer activists 
embrace the idea of fighting at a systemic level, the meaning of the 
term ‘system’ is not always clear, and nor is the political role played 
by individuals operating within the system. Marxists are, in compar-
ison, quite clear on what constitutes the system: the system is the 
laws and norms brought about by current material social relations 
born from earlier material social relations, and the system is also 
the material social relations themselves. The system can be named: 
feudalist, capitalist, socialist, and so on. Nuances and shifts within 
systems – monopoly capitalism, neoliberalism, Keynesianism, and 
state capitalism – are topics that Marxists outline and debate. A 
materialist conception of politics does not mean that gender rela-
tions are reducible to economic conditions (for example, factory 
occupation is not a panacea for ending sexual assault). Conditions 
are not reducible to material social relations; however, they are 
generated from the matrix of material social relations. 
If system change does not come through challenges to language 
and imagery (as poststructuralism and queer theory argue) or by 
dismantling hierarchical relationships within institutions (as femi-
nism argues), the question for Marxists becomes: ‘What can be 
done in the here and now?’ Criticizing language and institutional 
hierarchies seems doable, but transforming the whole of material 
social relations? What could be done short of revolution? Marxist 
responses to this question have ranged from defeatism to desperate 
moral calls for immediate revolution, to revolutionaries indis-
criminately throwing themselves onto the machine in the hope of 
slowing the gears, to the social democratic argument that socialism 
will evolve on its own through reforms (Bernstein 1961), to a 
strategy of militant urban occupations that envision capitalism’s 
imminent destruction, one building at a time.5 
Many Marxists – myself included – have found Rosa Luxem-
burg’s dialectical approach to the problem to be productive (see 
Luxemburg 2007). For Luxemburg, revolution is not the polar 
Politics of Everybody.indd 22 02/12/2015 17:44
23
Terms of the debate
opposite of reform; nor is Luxemburg worried that political subjects 
will become complacent if reforms are won. When people fight 
and win reforms, they are not less likely to continue fighting; they 
are more likely to continue fighting. Fighting for reforms is a way 
to build political muscle. In the process of struggling for reforms, 
solidarities are forged and revolutionary forces develop the polit-
ical clarity to take on more complicated challenges. This approach 
also requires that subjects develop the capacity to integrate situ-
ated and objective knowledge. If one disdains situated knowledge 
within a field of struggle, one quickly becomes a caricature of the 
variety of Leninist revolutionary who rushes into battle to bestow 
her higher wisdom upon the struggling masses.6 Trust is earned 
by paying attention to the situation at hand, not by presenting 
abstract theories. Moreover, pushing abstract, prefabricated revo-
lutionary platforms obscures the concrete historical and material 
politics that comprise Marxist practice. Reforming immediate 
conditions is a component of revolutionary activity. Reconciling 
ongoing situated knowledge with a deeper understanding of objec-
tive material conditions, along with a commitment to changing 
those conditions, is revolutionary praxis.
While queer thinkers are quick to point out that the libera-
tion of labor does not spontaneously solve all homophobia and 
transphobia, they have been remiss in pointing out that the radical 
reframing of discourse does not liberate labor. Disrupting linguistic 
phenomena is not sufficient to remedy systemic injustice because 
it cannot substantially disrupt material conditions. Likewise, femi-
nists have correctly pointed out that Marx failed to fully consider 
social reproductive labor outside the factory, but the feminist 
move away from Marx and towards a concern with hierarchy and 
hetero-patriarchy merely denounced capitalism and focused on 
developing strategies for surviving it: denouncing and enduring do 
not disrupt a system, let alone end it. While feminist opinion about 
reform is highly dependent on the particular mode of feminist 
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The Politics of Everybody
24
thought (radical, Black feminist, materialist, etc.), for queer theory, 
reform is almost impossible by definition, because an entire way of 
thought must be overhauled. The fact that queer political theory is 
skeptical of reform is a manifestation of its faith that political trans-
formation is another name for conceptual transformation. In other 
words, it is a classic example of philosophical idealism. 
The critique of political economy cannot be sacrificed in favor 
of intuitive or situated knowledge, but situated knowledge is 
necessary for concrete strategy. Genuine antiracist and anti-sexist 
training happens in the streets, not in the safe space of the univer-
sity classroom. This is because, in the streets, bonds of solidarity are 
developed at the level of shared political goals, be those goals imme-
diate reform or revolution. In the classroom, training is a matter 
of comparing theoretical precepts. (The caveat here is that when 
the classroom is a site of broad struggle, it becomes a part of ‘the 
streets’.) This means that revolutionary political practice involves 
both considering and transcending experiential knowledge. If third-
wave feminist and trans/queer praxis wishes to be politically (not 
just sentimentally) anti-capitalist, then it has to start talking about 
capitalist production. Likewise, if Marxists want to go beyond intel-
lectualized solidarity, Marxist political practice requires an exchange 
of working-class perspectives. Learning about the language and 
debates inside queer, trans, and feminist political movements is not 
useless identity politics but the concrete practice of solidarity. This 
goes beyond the truism that revolutionary forces must contain a 
diverse cross-section of the population. The relationship between 
the composition of a political movement and identity is complex. 
Without actors immanent to the situation at hand, interventions in 
movements will be perceived as intrusive; however, Marxist groups 
are in a double bind here: if a collective sends its members into 
political situations where the member’s identity allows access, not 
only is identity politics reinforced (i.e. Caribbean Marxists are the 
ones who should know about Caribbean politics, queer Marxists are 
Politics of Everybody.indd 24 02/12/2015 17:44
25
Terms of the debate
the ones who should know about gender politics, and so on), but 
the member is still seen as an emissary from a group, not a subject 
contributing from the heart. The challenge for any Marxist, then, is 
at once to be knowledgeable about the world, about themself, and 
about the group they operate within and to be able to articulate 
political suggestions that embody these areas of knowledge: a chal-
lenging ethos if ever there was one. 
Queer (anti-)identity
The integration of queer and trans people into ‘the everybody’ – 
or the refusal to integrate queer and trans people – is a critical 
political choice. Queer theory, with its philosophical roots in 
the Foucauldian search for marginalized shadow populations, is 
committed to inclusivity; however, it is also indebted to Heid- 
eggerian phenomenology, which confines being-in-the-world to 
local languagenetworks, which, in turn, stymies the possibility of 
international analysis. To further complicate the matter, contem-
porary queer politics developed within Western political conditions, 
particularly American political conditions. Internationalizing the 
queer, if done by Americans in the spirit of liberal pluralism, will 
undoubtedly be an imperialist queer politics that reduces concrete 
politics and histories to parallels with American history and culture. 
Yet gender non-conformity and homosexuality are not an Amer-
ican or European invention (see Drucker 2015).7 Same-sex activity 
and gender non-conforming identities exist around the world and 
have done so throughout history. Examples of challenges to the 
myth of universal heterosexual gender dimorphism are numerous: 
from kathoey in Thailand to hijra in India and Pakistan, muxes in 
Mexico and sworn virgins in Albania.8 Moreover, international 
groups politically adopting the word ‘queer’ do not necessarily 
think of themselves as having a political essence that connects them 
to a global community based on gender and sexuality. The group 
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The Politics of Everybody
26
alQaws for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian society9 
recognizes that queer politics emerged historically in the United 
States; however, the group maintains that Palestinian queers do 
not necessarily share the demands of American queers. Moreover, 
Palestinian queers do not see the struggle for gender diversity as 
being separable from the larger Palestinian struggle; they do not 
participate in Israeli Pride or consider themselves allied with 
Israeli queers. The politics of alQaws does not primarily consist 
of reforming discourse or even fighting homophobia. Its political 
practice is rooted in anticolonial struggle. 
Language and identity (or, more pointedly, marginalized iden-
tity, which plays the role of a sort of anti-identity identity) have 
been the center of gravity of queer politics in the United States; 
the result has been a sort of Anglocentric communalism. Debates 
about American identities – high femme, lesbian, queer, transgen-
dered butch, transsexual, stud, aggressive, marimacha/o, etc. – sit 
awkwardly within an international context. In fact, even for those 
with anti-capitalist sympathies, a fascination with Anglophone 
identity politics creates the conditions for absorption into a cultural 
consciousness along the lines of what Jasbir Puar has termed homo- 
nationalism. While Anglophone queer people are not necessarily 
proponents of imperialism, it is no surprise that a politics grounded 
in linguistic idealism has largely failed to embrace anti-imperialist 
solidarity with other queer people in other parts of the world. 
But before too much contempt is heaped upon this inward-
gazing form of politics, it is important that we do not overestimate 
the level of social acceptance that has been extended to queer and 
trans people in the West. Despite recent marriage equality victories 
and some reduction in homophobia among the general popula-
tion (however, it is important to remember that, within a liberal 
pluralist society, a deeply entrenched conservative opposition is 
awarded permanent space), the suicide rates of gays and lesbians, 
particularly youth, are consistently high, and the rate of suicide 
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27
Terms of the debate
attempts among transgendered people in the United States is an 
astronomical 41 percent (Grant et al. 2011). The murder rate of 
Black trans women is shockingly high, and anti-LGBT violence has 
trended upwards in the US during the second decade of the new 
millennium. It should be no great mystery why people besieged in 
every direction, in addition to suffering exploitation and denial of 
employment, would care deeply about developing a language to 
describe themselves in order to assert their own existence. Learning 
about such identities is not opposed to materialist politics, and 
the insistence on identities can be understood not as an expres-
sion of capitalist individualism but as a declaration of the right to 
self-determination. 
Nor does queer and trans people’s struggle for self-definition fall 
outside the realm of material phenomena. Queer and trans status 
has an impact on the meaning of being a woman, and often reflects 
struggles around gendered labor and class antagonism. In the 
1970s, the lesbian-feminist organizations emerging out of Amer-
ican college life treated working-class butch/femme queer women 
with disdain. Middle-class feminist academics scorned gender 
in general as a mode of false consciousness, and they considered 
masculinity in particular to be a form of social violence. While, 
on the surface, this antagonism was a debate about language and 
identity, disgust for the working class was palpable. For those who 
had to sell gendered bodies on the labor market as dockworkers, 
secretaries, waitresses, prostitutes or showgirls, gender was a bodily 
expression of everyday life that could not be politically debated 
away as merely false. For those whose lives were structured by 
working-class lesbian bar culture, masculine women physically 
defended the safe space of the bar from homophobic attack. Femi-
nine women could support the community financially by working 
in the heterosexual world; and femme caretaking held the commu-
nity together when it was recovering from police repression and 
sexual violence.10 
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28
The language used by queer women in America in the twen-
tieth century differed from descriptions of gender non-conforming 
people in Victorian culture. At the beginning of the gay move-
ment, before the word homosexual was invented in Victorian 
England, German writer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs devised the word 
uranian, which referenced Plato’s Symposium; the word described 
‘man-manly love’ and a transgendered or ‘third sex’ social position 
(Kennedy 2005). Indeed, all queerness was reduced to a biological 
disorder – and queerness literally meant anything that challenged 
social roles. Researchers built upon Ulrichs’ ideas. The medical 
community described uranians as ‘mental hermaphrodites’ while, 
conversely, being born intersex entailed mental deviance. Prosti-
tutes, feminists, and even working-class women were considered 
biologically different (Smith-Rosenberg 1985). Indeed, as late as 
the 1940s, in the United States the term ‘lesbian’ meant ‘masculine 
woman’. A couple was comprised of a lesbian and her girlfriend. 
When asked whether or not their lovers were also lesbians, some 
found the question bizarre – of course their girlfriends weren’t 
lesbians (Kennedy and Davis 1993). As butch/femme culture devel-
oped in the mid-century, both partners began to view themselves 
as lesbians, except when they rejected the lesbian label altogether 
because it seemed to now refer to the middle-class white lesbians 
who opposed gender on principle (Feinberg 1993). 
The term ‘queer’ emerged as a move away from the biologi-
cally grounded homosexual identities of ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ towards 
a more inclusive political movement. It was also an alternative 
to the awkward alphabet soup of GLB or LGBT, or even more 
awkward constructions such as lesbigay,11 where only four possible 
sexual orientations are possible: gay, lesbian, bisexual, and hetero-
sexual. Redolent of the radical feminist prohibition on gender, 
the term ‘lesbigay’ erased trans12 people from the political equa-
tion. It is important to note that one need not adopt an idealist, 
anti-materialist position to see the social parameters at work here. 
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29
Terms of the debate
The term lesbigay did not accidentally exclude or overlook trans 
inclusion. The exclusion was intentional. On the other hand, some 
trans people did not necessarily want to be included in thelesbigay 
club; the homosexual struggle was a sexual struggle, whereas theirs 
was a struggle over gender and no more about sexual desire than 
the mainstream women’s rights movement. Later, some intersex 
conservatives and their families disputed inclusion in the term 
LGBTQI because intersexuality was a physical condition present 
at birth, not a ‘choice’. 
As the term grew longer (into LGBTQQIAA: lesbian, gay, 
bisexual, trans, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, allies), many 
were still not included in the potentially infinite taxonomy. For 
example, where would the cisgendered partners of trans and 
genderqueer people fit in? Others argued that survivors of testic-
ular cancer might necessitate the addition of an ‘E’ for eunuch 
as genital and hormonal changes sometimes produce a change in 
self-definition (Aucoin and Wassersug 2006). As a default, queer 
became a popular umbrella term, a clear way to articulate that an 
antagonism existed: there were two politicized categories of people 
in the world, straights and queers. This new cross-class dichotomy 
wasn’t simply a linguistic clarification; it was born out of a decade 
of AIDS activism. As gay men were dying – sometimes in a matter 
of weeks – anti-gay oppression was a more visible and immediate 
threat to existence for many than the system-wide extraction 
of surplus value; homophobia within the working class and the 
decline of American labor amplified this trend. Radical feminist 
separatism no longer made sense for those middle-class and white 
lesbians who had just participated in a decade of direct action 
standing beside gay men. But this new cross-class unity did more 
than blur class antagonism; it also assumed that a queer political 
identity was more fundamental than other political antagonisms 
such as race, which put whites in the position of defining the terms 
of the American queer movement. 
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30
Since the decline of AIDS politics, a new definition of the word 
queer has competed with the idea of the queer umbrella. This 
new sense of queer emerged from Lisa Duggan’s term homonor-
mativity. Queer was a moniker that embraced a working-class 
or poor, radical, and anti-capitalist identity in opposition to 
‘homonormative’ middle- and upper-class gays and lesbians who 
were perceived as seeking acceptance from heterosexuals. But unlike 
the era of butch/femme, which was tightly tied to actual class posi-
tion, gender queerness and anti-capitalist ideology were no longer 
situated in the realities of class; rather, anti-capitalist radicalism 
became a badge, a militant identity disconnected from the material 
world: plenty of working-class and poor gays and lesbians were 
‘normative’ and a good chunk of queer-identified ‘gender radicals’ 
were middle and upper class. What’s more, the primacy of the 
queer/normative antagonism was global in theory only; in prac-
tice, the Anglocentrism of language-intensive politics isolated the 
Anglo-American queer movement. The fact that most global poli-
tics involve class, immigrant, and anticolonial struggle left all but 
middle-class Americans at the periphery of the queer movement. 
I will later argue that homonationalism (see Puar 2007) develops 
within this set of political parameters regardless of the behavioral 
norms of individuals (see ‘Beyond homonormativity and homo- 
nationalism’ in Chapter 3). 
Sex and social gender: dichotomy or dialectic?
Twentieth-century queer theory emerged, in part, as a response to 
the anti-gender thrust of second-wave radical feminism. Women 
were defined as people with a particular biological heritage suffering 
violence at the hands of patriarchy. Femininity was considered a 
weapon to keep women under patriarchal control. Gender was no 
longer considered to be an essence emerging from a specific body 
type; rather, it was a cultural construct, a form of ideology and 
Politics of Everybody.indd 30 02/12/2015 17:44
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Terms of the debate
therefore unnatural. The goal of a good portion of second-wave 
feminism was to liberate the female body from the idea of the femi-
nine. Thus, to behave in a feminine manner was to be atavistic, 
anti-feminist, co-opted. To behave in a masculine manner was 
evidence of internalized self-hatred and a violation of women- 
centric social norms. For lesbian separatists divorced from the social 
and material conditions of compulsory heterosexual life, ‘masculine’ 
and ‘feminine’ behavior became highly policed abstract pejoratives. 
Everyone was expected to be ‘free’ and ‘genderless’. A queer back-
lash emerged from the impossibility of the project.13 Queer theory 
flipped the script: it was sex that was constructed by gender, the 
latter being inscribed into social reality through repetition. 
Since the turn of the millennium, narratives between trans 
women (who are certain of their womanhood despite their imposed 
social identity) and queer theorists (who argue that both woman-
hood and femininity are social constructs and therefore unstable) 
have started to reproduce some of the hotly contested sex/gender 
debates of the 1970s, but with the arguments reversed. The new 
contention highlights the fact that both queers and radical feminists 
consider gender to be a construct; the two positions are divided 
only on the social meaning of the construct. Radical feminism 
considers gender to be an expression of internalized patriarchy and 
views the body as an irreducible fact – with the distinction between 
male/female bodies indeed constructing the political dynamics 
of everyday life. For radical feminists, women’s responsibility for 
childbirth and women’s vulnerability to rape produce conditions 
for the rise of patriarchy. Radical feminism’s definition of woman-
hood as a situation defined by the social consequences of having 
specific reproductive organs put its proponents on a collision 
course with trans politics. Deducing politics from sexual dimor-
phism and reducing gender to ideology, trans-exclusionary radical 
feminists have militantly insisted that not only are trans women not 
women but that they are the most violent men of all: men intent 
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32
on colonizing women’s bodies; men so intent on raping lesbian 
women that they are willing to transform their bodies to carry out 
their sinister plans.14 Trans-exclusionary radical feminists (referred 
to here as TERFs) have aligned with the religious right in their 
attempts to keep trans women from using bathrooms reflecting 
their lived gender. Leading TERFs have created websites designed 
to ridicule trans women and trans men, and they have even tried to 
dissuade the United Nations from acknowledging trans rights.15 Yet 
despite this antagonism, both TERFs and many trans women insist 
that women’s bodies are definable and grounded in biological fact. 
The difference is that those who wish to exclude trans women from 
womanhood insist upon the presence of visible ‘birthright’ biolog-
ical markers that would determine an individual’s social trajectory: 
particular clusters of secondary sex characteristics, particular geni-
tals, the experience of menstruation. Trans individuals, however, 
unlike queer activists, do not necessarily root their experience of 
womanhood outside biology; instead, some maintain that there 
are invisible biological factors at work – neurological differences 
or exposure to hormones in the womb. But here, biology is a series 
of material processes independent of social ontology.16 After all, 
the presence of ovaries and the experience of menstruation are not 
grounds for womanhood. If they were, it would mean that some 
trans men should automatically be considered women and cis 
women with amenorrhea would not be. 
Unlike TERFs, queer activists tend to be trans-supportive; in 
fact, since sexual orientation is distinct from gender identity, there 
is anoverlap between queer and trans community membership. But 
queer politics is anti-identitarian and predicated on social construc-
tion: in queer theory, no one is innately a man or a woman, and 
anyone can perform masculinity and femininity. The queer theoret-
ical attitude towards gender identity is also marked by a politicized 
voluntarism: here, irreverent self-construction of the gendered body 
is the key to subverting the disciplinary apparatus of power. But 
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Terms of the debate
politicized gender also implies consciously choosing to be a gender 
outlaw and this is precisely what the trans community argues indi-
viduals should not have to be. Trans men and women are not the 
only ones who sit uncomfortably within the political paradigm 
of gender transgression. While the idea of the queer emerged as a 
response to the radical feminist exclusion of working-class butch/
femme culture, queer thought has never been fully comfortable with 
butch/femme as a stable pattern of desire.17 But the trans criticism 
of queer theory’s trivialization of gender identity does not stand 
as the final word. Because intersex bodies fall somewhere along a 
sexual spectrum, the reassertion of the truth of sexual dimorphism 
that emerges within certain sections of the trans movement erases 
the complex embodied experience of intersex persons. Moreover, 
the argument that there is an antagonism between trans and cis 
identities leaves intersex people without a political location. 
Debates about definitions internal to queer culture would not 
necessarily be of immediate political interest to Marxists (or at least 
not to Marxists outside queer and trans communities). However, 
there is a fundamental difference between disputes over language 
and the antagonism between working-class lesbians and lesbian 
CEOs, or between trans people and those who wish to wipe them 
off the face of the earth. The imprisonment of CeCe McDonald, a 
Black trans woman imprisoned for the death of a white supremacist 
who assaulted her on the street, highlighted the need for cisgen-
dered, heterosexual Marxists to understand trans politics. Talking 
to people in ways that do not make them feel utterly alienated is a 
baseline requirement for solidarity. 
A	final	word	on	queer	language
My understanding of language and identity in this book will 
undoubtedly be imperfect; but nonetheless, as a realist who does 
not believe that language makes communication impossible, I will 
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34
try to use terms that reflect the expressions most common at this 
particular moment (in the Anglophone world). I will try to use the 
most general pronouns whenever possible, including the singular 
‘they’, ‘them’ and ‘their’ as both a pronoun for gender queer persons 
and a universal pronoun; however, when I am using the work of 
feminists who are referring to women, I will use the pronoun ‘she’; 
when I am referring to historical individuals identified as men, I 
will use the pronoun ‘he’. There will be times, however, when I 
intentionally use feminine pronouns to underscore the existence 
of women and gender non-conforming people within domains 
commonly associated with masculinity. The term ‘cisgendered’ 
is widely used for non-trans people who move through life with 
a body that matches their gender presentation. ‘Cissexism’ will 
be used to describe the systematic exclusion and erasure of trans 
people. However, even among trans allies, the term cisgender does 
not avoid contention. As mentioned earlier, some intersex people 
feel that the cis/trans binary reinforces the two-sex model and 
that intersex18 people are hence written out of language. The term 
also fails to describe (or is used unevenly to describe) many queer 
people who face discrimination and violence for transgressing 
gender assumptions, regardless of whether or not they are trans. 
The word ‘queer’ itself also contains a number of meanings. 
When queer is an umbrella term with a meaning roughly synon-
ymous to LGBT, I will call this queer in the ‘queer umbrella’ sense. 
However, queer has always had another referent: those who are 
not heterosexual nor cisgendered but who do not fit neatly within 
the LGBT classification. I will call this queer in the LGBTQ sense. 
The concept of homonormativity created another sense of queer 
– queer as a transgressive anti-identity in opposition to gay and 
lesbian identity. Because one of the symbols of this movement is a 
transformation of the equal sign19 into a greater-than symbol, I will 
call this radical queer because it sees queerness as both a defining 
political problem and a moral-political solution. 
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Terms of the debate
The explication of these terms is not a detour away from ‘real 
politics’ into ‘identity politics’ but a clarification of meaning and an 
attempt to affirm the right to self-determination. Marxists are no 
strangers to paying attention to language. We have spent generations 
debating whether or not the Soviet Union was a degenerated workers’ 
state or a deformed workers’ state, or whether it was ‘really existing 
socialism’, and even longer debating the term ‘proletarian’ itself. In 
the chaos of struggle, it is standard practice to map the terrain of the 
battlefield and locate its borders and edges. When people’s lives do 
not make sense within the hegemonic order, words will be invented. 
It is not a concession to some phantom of identity politics to 
embrace the language of the oppressed. It is not a concession to post- 
modernism or linguistic constructivism (the theory that language 
creates the material world) to use words that arise from worldly ex- 
perience. In fact, doing so reflects a materialist approach to language. 
II. What is capitalism? 
One of my biggest challenges here is to describe the Marxist critique 
of political economy in a way that is clear without being reductive. 
My strategy is to outline the skeletal points of the Marxian view 
of capitalism as a system of social relations. There is considerable 
debate about what Marx intended (exacerbated by the fact that 
Capital was intended to be six volumes long but Marx died during 
the writing process), what Marx got wrong, what is a legitimate 
method to prove Marx right or wrong, and at what point aban-
doning or adding to Marx’s ideas subverts Marx altogether. 
This book rests on a number of propositions about capitalism, 
all derived from some of the least contentious elements of Marx’s 
thought among Marxists: 
1. capitalism is not a plutocratic conspiracy but an impersonal 
system – as a functioning whole, it is not immoral but rather 
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amoral or beyond morality since it is not a conscious entity – 
and, because we are dealing with a process and not persons, 
moral fist-shaking and appeals to capitalism for mercy have 
been and will continue to be fruitless; 
2. capitalism is not a broken system – on the contrary, it generally 
functions in accordance with its own laws; 
3. capitalism’s optimal functioning entails the rational extraction 
of profit from commodities – particularly commodified labor – 
despite irrational consequences; 
4. capitalist production processes are a threat to the global eco -
system and they immiserate the world’s majority;20 
5. crises are a general feature of capitalism but the presence of crises 
never directly suggests that capitalism is collapsing or coming to 
an end through purely mechanistic contradictions (see Henning 
2014: 17–42; Kautsky 1910; Bernstein 1961)21 – capitalism 
can end only through intentional political intervention;22
6. capitalism should be supplanted via such an intentional polit-
ical intervention. 
The following is a brief sketch of the development of capitalism 
out of feudalism, followed by the